Hey guys, I feel like I wasn’t able to really get across what I felt were important points about our curriculum project during our call today so I’m going to try to clarify them for you now in an email (that I’ll also post on the blog, so if you have any responses post them there).
So we’re being tasked to design the presentation that either we or some group will give to the villagers of Suro Antivo. Now, one of the goals of that presentation–which everyone can agree upon–is that we need to transfer knowledge of the health benefits of sanitation as well as the means to achieve those benefits. We’re not on any sort of ethically shaky ground here because all we’re doing is providing knowledge that is generally agreed to be correct to people who willingly come to hear us and we’re letting those people do what they wish with that knowledge.
However, since one of our overaching goals for the project is to improve health among the villagers of Suro Antivo and since there is a strong and direct correlation between sanitary practices and health, we might decide that we want to do everything we can (ie, more than just transfer knowledge) to get the villagers to adopt sanitary practices. One such way to increase the adoption of sanitary practices is through persuasion.
If we designed the curriculum to not just be informative, but persuasive as well, then we would add elements that attempted to change the behavior of our listeners (now, I think a fair argument would be that even the informative-only approach attempts to change behaviors, but with the persuasive approach, changing behavior would be an explicit goal). Now, there are levels of persuasiveness you can use. You can simply rely on your authority as someone who seems to know what they’re talking about and say “you should really wash your hands!” and stuff like that. Or, you can take it quite a bit further and use techniques from marketing and other disciplines who have studied human behavior and have well-established methods for changing people’s behavior.
Now, the question is–do we design our curriculum to be solely informative, or to be persuasive as well? If persuasive, how much persuasion are we willing to use?
I would encourage you not to take this matter lightly, because the decision we come to here really sets a precident for the type of development organization that we are, and what development doctrine we adhere to. Just to show you that there are different schools of development thought who would answer the questions I’ve posed very differently, I’ve liked you to two different readings (Encountering Development and Marketing Safe Water Solutions) a that roughly argue for and against persuasion.
The Escobar reading (of which you only need to read from the beginning to the end of the second paragraph on page 5–though if you have time at some point, I’d like to have us read the whole thing, because it’s a fascinating different take on development) attacks that idea that Group A, which believes it knows better than Group B what is good for Group B, has the ethical right to do anything to Group B without Group B’s express permission, even if Group A thinks it is acting in the best interests of Group B (haha, sorry if that’s confusing). Furthermore, the reading argues that such efforts have been totally unsuccessful historically. From this school of thought comes to common practice we see currently that NGOs don’t do development unless the target of the development asks to be helped and that the help provided should be based upon what the target asks for (often discovered through a needs assessment). To this school of thought, you should only give people information and let them do with it as they please–you should NOT try to impose your ideas upon them.
The contrary opinion, provided by Marketing Safe Water Solutions (skim to get the main ideas), argues that such ideas are hindering development. Marketing provides all sorts of unused methods to improve peoples health by changing their behaviors, and while developers worry about ethics, corporations (who have no such concerns) are already using methods from marketing to great effect.
Think about this, read the 2.5 pages from Escobar and skim MSWS, and let’s discuss this issue on Wednesday.
P.S. It also occurred to me that Green Empowerment and/or Solucciones Practicas might be expecting a certain kind of curriculum, so that’s also something for us to take into consideration.